Concept Wars: Weapons of Mass Marketing

Secret warplane design shops hire teams of artists to generate images of future aircraft that the press and aviation-minded public then obsess over. But who are the real targets of this marketing, and how reliable are the images?

According to the media coverage, Lockheed Martin and Boeing revealed designs of their newest secret warplanes this week at the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space Conference and Expo. Phantom Works, Boeing's secret aviation division, released images of its next-generation fighter, the F/A-XX. Meanwhile, a few booths away, Lockheed's Skunk Works was showcasing new artist renderings of the Sea Ghost, a stealthy carrier-launched unmanned aerial vehicle.

The Sea Ghost got attention too: Bloggers commented on the lack of humps on its skin, an indication that sensors are now shrinking.

These comments are all true, from an aviation standpoint. But the writers are evaluating images that have more to do with government marketing than with aerodynamics or radar physics. It's sort of like critiquing a movie by watching the auditions.

"This was not an unveiling of a new Boeing airplane," says Phantomworks spokeswoman Deborah VanNierop. "Phantom Works … very regularly comes up with graphics of what we think the product might look like. More often than not, the end product is not a reflection of the first few graphics."

The computer-generated images show up at defense conferences, where trade journalists and bloggers naturally pore over them, but the actual audience for these renderings is not the public but military officials.

Boeing

"This is the second F/A-XX graphic we released," VanNierop says. "After the first one, the customer (the Pentagon) said the aircraft could be optionally piloted. We said, hmm, let's look at the graphic again … There is usually context in the graphic, more than can we can say publicly."

What an aerospace analyst might see in an image could have nothing to do with the message being sent to the U.S. military. "What we wanted to do [with the F/A-XX image] is to show the customer that we want to be a player in this competition," VanNierop says.

A lot of the details in these images are the product of the in-house teams of graphics artists, not aeronautical engineers. "They do an amazing job, given the limited information we give them," VanNierop says.

Their rivals at Skunk Works agree that their press images can be taken too literally.

Robert Ruszkowski, director of Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike development at Lockheed, says it's a good idea to view images of future aircraft with more than a grain of salt. "Very early in the process, we could be looking at multiple versions," he says.

The concept images are not entirely divorced from the engineers' plans, however. At Lockheed, the staff of in-house artists (more than 100 of them) receive aircraft images from engineers to start with. The artists convert an image using modeling software and embellish as needed. So the lack of bumps on the skin of an aircraft has less to do with the size of onboard sensors, and more to do with simple aesthetics. Other details will be intentionally obscured to preserve secrecy, either from a national security standpoint or in the interest of industrial competition, Ruszkowski and VanNierop both say.

Ruszkowski says Lockheed prides itself on the high quality of its public releases. He says the company may have good reason to leave out details of an airplane, but it takes pains to produce images that show its conceptual aircraft in realistic action. He points to an image of the Sea Ghost launching from a carrier deck. The plane itself shows few details, but the angle and altitude of the departing aircraft is accurate. Design details can be fudged, but making a mistake while showing operations can erode confidence. "We do screen these very carefully," he says. "The military customers appreciate it."

The root reason for the public hunger for details is the secrecy of the airplane makers. It's the same reason a celebrity baby that is kept in seclusion generates tabloid cover stories, while an oft-seen tot gets no coverage. The demand for information is high, so any detail—however overanalyzed—is considered newsworthy.

That idea can be extrapolated to understand why the defense press—Popular Mechanics certainly included—is so eager for something cool to cover. "We can generate far more concepts for future aircraft than there are available resources to produce," Ruszkowski says.

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